A Comprehensive Security Architecture for Information Management throughout the Lifecycle of IoT Products

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is expected to have an impact on business and the world at large in a way comparable to the Internet itself. An IoT product is a physical product with an associated virtual counterpart connected to the internet with computational as well as communication capabilities. The possibility to collect information from internet-connected products and sensors gives unprecedented possibilities to improve and optimize product use and maintenance. Virtual counterpart and digital twin (DT) concepts have been proposed as a solution for providing the necessary information management throughout the whole product lifecycle, which we here call product lifecycle information management (PLIM). Security in these systems is imperative due to the multiple ways in which opponents can attack the system during the whole lifecycle of an IoT product. To address this need, the current study proposes a security architecture for the IoT, taking into particular consideration the requirements of PLIM. The security architecture has been designed for the Open Messaging Interface (O-MI) and Open Data Format (O-DF) standards for the IoT and product lifecycle management (PLM) but it is also applicable to other IoT and PLIM architectures. The proposed security architecture is capable of hindering unauthorized access to information and restricts access levels based on user roles and permissions. Based on our findings, the proposed security architecture is the first security model for PLIM to integrate and coordinate the IoT ecosystem, by dividing the security approaches into two domains: user client and product domain. The security architecture has been deployed in smart city use cases in three different European cities, Helsinki, Lyon, and Brussels, to validate the security metrics in the proposed approach. Our analysis shows that the proposed security architecture can easily integrate the security requirements of both clients and products providing solutions for them as demonstrated in the implemented use cases.